--- JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
> an die nachgeborenen writes:
>
> >The estimates of millions of women killed in the
> witch
> >hunt are a rad fem myth.>
> Some estimates have the population of Germany halved
> by the 30 Years War
> (starting 1618).
That's Germany and Bohemia -- the witchcraze was pan-European. There are bo reasons to thing (quite the contary)that the 30 years war (1619-48), has such catastrophic effects on France, England, Italy, Poland, Spain, etc., where the stakes for wirches balzed quite as brightly as in Germany. I also think the 50% mortatlity ratew for Germany in the 30 ueats wae is too high, though who knows, however, if one added the alleged deaths of ,illions of women. Germany would have been utterly depopulated and not recovered ina generation. It did take many places three centuries to recover to pre-Black Death (1349-52) populations, so that supports the ide that if Germany's recovery from the 30 Years War took only a generation or two, that we are not talking abour Black Death mortality rates + millions of excess female deaths due to the witch craze.
>
>
> Estimates go from 30,000 to several million. I
> can't argue the varying
> credibility of sources on towns having wiped out
> their entire female population
> (Trier is one town I remember).
I don't believe it. Trier was a major metropolitan center, quite capapable of massacring the Jews, but all the women? Noy a chance.
I'm pretty sure
> they preceed second wave
> feminism, though. Arguing that it couldn't have
> happened on such a scale locally
> because it would've caused economic chaos is not,
> unfortunately, evidence of much
> when it comes to the Church in Europe. Even their
> own inquisitors get the
> stake occasionally.
A weak argument. The Inquisitors didn't have the power to execute anyone (it had to turn prople over to the secular arm) , and the nobility and bourgeoisie, greatly strengthened in power the perood of the witch craze, would have put the kibosh oan anything sp economically insane. Shall we ask Brob Brenner, a friend and comrade of mine, who is a pre-eminent expert on this period and a sometimes lurker?
Just because we haven't figured
> out a materialist
> explanation doesn't mean it couldn't happen, it just
> means we haven't figured it out.
Sure. But, btw, Chris, there is an obvious amterialist explanation for medieval antisemiyism, with the Jews' roles as moneylenders.
>> Well, there's the question of the ratio of the
> sexes--if there were a lot
> more women than men, due to wars, then you might
> have a different situation than
> that which you are describing. That maternal
> mortality rate sounds high to
> me.
But it's accurate -- see Laslett or Boswell or lots of sorces, About half the children died before the age of 5. This is pretty much rock-solid.
When male doctors started to make considerable
> inroads in the nineteenth
> century (and started spreading puerperal fever) it
> *increased* the maternal
> mortality rate to one in 20.
A big decarese if only one in 20, though medical intervention in childbirth was no help. Now, the rates might have dropped in the 18th century due to improved public health measures and to incresed agricultural productivity, edtc. Gerneral mortality dropped in the 18th C and life expectnact increased. Doubt taht it dropped to the point taht one in 20 counted as an increase.
>
> I agree that the argument that there was a threat to
> the 'medical profession'
> is weak, since there wasn't much of a medical
> profession. (Maybe someone
> else made that argument here?) I was repeating
> Jules Michelet's (1958)
Michelet was a mid 19th historian/
argument
> that it was the *church* that was threatened. If
> afflictions were brought by
> god as punishment, you could see that curing them
> might be undermining of
> doctrine and authority. Among those afflictions (or
> gifts from god, depending on
> how you look at it) would be unrelieved
> childbearing.
More nonmaterialist explanation. The church vuried its objections to the new science (astromony, etc.) pdq when this proved practically useful. It wasn'y going to go aroung burning millions of potentially childbearing women --an activity which would have required the cooperation of the seculaty authority -- on merely religiosu grounds.
>
> >Nor
> >does killing women en masse because some of them
> >practiced abortion and taught contraception make
> any
> >sense --
>
> Yes, that would be a simplistic argument. More
> likely they were trying to
> stamp out the earlier religions
These were long gone by the 17th century.
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